Portnoy: Deluca’s ‘the real deal’
Deluca’s Pizzeria is “the real deal,” according to Dave Portnoy, the chief content officer for Barstool Sports who also performs “One Bite Pizza Reviews” on YouTube.
Portnoy, who visited Hot Springs last Friday for the Rebel Stakes at Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort, visited the pizzeria that night for dinner and to do his review of the pizza, which owner Anthony Valinoti told Portnoy is made in the New Haven style.
Valinoti said Wednesday that Oaklawn’s general manager, Wayne Smith, gave him a headsup he was bringing Portnoy to the pizzeria.
“I owe Wayne Smith a great debt of gratitude,” Valinoti said. “He could have easily had him eat at Oaklawn. He could easily have him eat anywhere else, but he was kind enough to bring him to Deluca’s personally. So I owe
Wayne a big, big shoutout.”
Before arriving in Hot Springs, Portnoy had asked his followers on Twitter where he should eat, and the overwhelming reply was Deluca’s.
“Dave and I were laughing about it because — he even says it in the video, ‘It’s the most overhyped place in America,’” Valinoti recalled. “He goes, ‘You know, there’s no way this could be good. … We do this all the time, and we go to a place and invariably, they aren’t good. They recommend it, but it just isn’t good. It doesn’t live up to that billing.’”
Valinoti said Portnoy was served a Sidetown, “a basic cheese pizza with … fresh mozzarella that we make in-house.”
“It’s very light, which is great,” Portnoy began before taking a bite. “Very good undercarriage right there, and the char, which (Valinoti) was telling me some of the Arkansas people are like ‘We don’t like char.’ If you don’t like char, you don’t like pizza.”
Lifting a slice, Portnoy noted it had “zero flop” before recognizing a large crowd that had gathered to watch the review live along with Valinoti. After taking three bites of the slice, Portnoy declared it “a spectacular pizza.”
“You’ve done something very hard to do,” he told Valinoti. “It’s super skinny and super light but super crispy and charred. It doesn’t really taste like New Haven to me, but this is as good as you can make it without that oven for me.”
After biting into his second slice, Portnoy declared the pizza an 8.7 on the 10-point scale he uses to rate pizzas, which is higher than the 8.4 score the pizzeria garnered from 38 reviews from the community of users of the One Bite app run by Barstool Sports.
“I was so excited; I was,” Valinoti said of the review. “I mean, it’s
all very subjective, but I always felt that we kind of made a pizza that he would like because it is in that style, that real New York style, that charred kind of brick-oven pizza. I was very, very surprised at the number, I was.”
While Portnoy was originally planning to just review the pizzeria, Valinoti said he changed his mind after he saw the restaurant.
“We had gotten word from Wayne Smith over at Oaklawn that he was staying at the property, and that he wanted to try the pizza, and he was going to come over around 6:30 p.m. to do that,” he said. “What he wound up doing was actually staying for dinner instead of just doing the review. He actually sat down, and once he saw the restaurant, he wanted to eat there.”
A former “Wall Street guy,” Valinoti got into making pizza thanks in part to seeing a slice of pizza and a glass of wine on the cover of a friend’s copy of Wine Spectator magazine. Valinoti’s parents passed away within two days of each other, and he was visiting a friend when he saw the magazine and said, “That’s what I’m going to do.”
Valinoti ended up going to Italy to learn from a pizza master, but “he just wasn’t that good at teaching; let’s put it that way.” After parting ways with the pizzaiolo, his translator suggested he contact a widow who lived in the area.
“She … was one of the best cooks I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “She saw that I had an interest in it, so she started to teach me to cook, and she started teaching a pizza. That’s what I came back with, and that was like 12 years ago.”
Growing up in Brooklyn, Valinoti was very familiar with the Neapolitan-style pizzas, but when he started to make his own, “it was just too wet.”
“I kind of changed in midstream there,” he said. “Again, as I was going, I was learning, and the people of Arkansas were so good to me because I would make these catastrophic mistakes. And I was lucky enough to realize that once I made that mistake, I wasn’t going to make that same mistake again. But they gave me leeway.”
Valinoti said most of what people love about his pizzas came from trial and error.
“I just learned to make dough by hand,” he said of one of his first improvements. “I wasn’t really technically proficient. I wasn’t a baker; I didn’t go to school for this. So it was all on-the-job training. … I noticed that sometimes when I made a mistake, it was a good mistake.”
When he started Deluca’s, which was named after his grandfather, Valinoti did most of the work himself, but now he relies on his staff.
“My executive chef, Zach Nix, has been with me almost eight years out of the 10 that we’re going,” he said. “Heather Post, my general manager, has been with me for nine years. … I mean I’m the face of it now, but it’s them. I always point the credit toward them and not so much toward me. My learning experience was about getting it out there, and then teaching it to people and then moving that forward.”
Valinoti said Portnoy told him he plans to return to Hot Springs next February for the Rebel Stakes.
“He did more for Hot Springs in 24 hours than any of us can do as far as promoting our city, and he said he’d be back next year for the Rebel again,” he said. “So I look forward to him returning to Hot Springs and going to some other places and hopefully spreading that same joy that he spread with us.”